PUTTIN' COLOGNE ON THE RICKSHAW

Last week I wrote about the dos and don’ts of the leadership practice of “Management by Walking Around” (MBWA). I pointed out that one of the key things to remember about an effective walk is that the boss shouldn’t immediately try to solve the issues or problems he/she discovers. That’s not the intent of MWBA at all. However, if the intent of the walk is to find issues then there is another way to do that: “The Gemba Walk.”

The term is really “Genba,” a Japanese term meaning “the real place.” In business, genba refers to the place where value is created; e.g., in manufacturing the genba/gemba is the factory floor. The Gemba can be any workplace such as a construction site, sales floor, office, anywhere value is added to a product or service. Taiichi Ohno, an executive at Toyota, led the development of the concept of the Gemba Walk. The Gemba Walk is a fundamental part of the Lean Manufacturing philosophy.

In lean manufacturing, the idea of the Gemba Walk is that the problems are usually visible, and these issues can be readily seen if you just look for them in a concentrated effort. The Gemba Walk’s ultimate goal is to find improvement ideas that can only come from going to the gemba. In other words, if you’re the captain of the ship and you want to know if there’s water sloshing around the engine room the best way to find out is go to the engine room. As Toyota Chairman Fujio Cho, described it, “go see, ask why, show respect.”

The “Gemba Walk,” much like Management by Walking Around, is an activity that takes management to the front lines. Pun intended it’s an opportunity to get your feet wet. In the Gemba Walk management goes as a group to the workplace, whereas in MBWA it’s best for a manager to go alone. The objective of the Gemba Walk is to understand the value stream (process) and identify problems (waste) rather than do a meet and greet.

In the United States, Kaizen and Kaizen events are usually thought of as the way to accomplish discovering value stream problems, or waste, and to make overall changes in the processes used to make the product. These Kaizen events can become week long projects singling out a specific workplace area, or department or a specific process. The intent of a Kaizen event is to fully change an area of work (value stream) in one concentrated effort. However, informal Gemba Walks by management can help achieve a step change, or frequent, incremental improvements−which was the original concept of Kaizen.

In my own experience Gemba Walks took the form of daily “stand-up” meetings, usually first thing in the morning, out on the production floor, or anywhere convenient for all the players to assemble. Along with identifying problems it was a good time to review whether a project was on schedule or not, because a project not on schedule is the perfect segue into discovering the problems that put it behind schedule. These get-togethers also allow for a review of what was accomplished the previous day and what needs to be accomplished the current day. In a way it’s a method of micromanaging without the debilitating results that occur when management plays “bring me another rock” from the safety of their offices.

The Gemba Walk works because it brings together the critical players in a workplace (operators, managers, quality, maintenance, engineers, etc.) so that they all hear about problems at the same time, and see the same data and can immediately offer their expertise. They are therefore all in a position to quickly decide on a course of action, and to initiate that action. The speed with which problems can be resolved can be dramatically increased compared to traditional problem solving which would wait for a problem to percolate up through the management layers and then percolate back down for action.

That all said, the Gemba Walk or Management by Walking Around, in the wrong management hands, can lead to organizational disaster. We must remember a Gemba Walk or Management by Walking Around is not an opportunity for the boss to find fault in the employees. Blamestorming should never be a part of a Gemba Walk. If the Gemba walk is used as a punitive tool, employees will shut down and resistance to change will rise rapidly. Thus management must think before talking. Many managers suffer from what’s called “situational amnesia.” Employees don’t suffer this–they remember everything.

Thus, management’s method of direct interaction with the employee’s is the most important aspect of the Gemba Walk. Management must make the employees feel respected throughout the process–as Fujio Cho described it: “show respect.” If management appears to “know it all” then there’s no point in doing the Gemba Walk−all it will do is alienate the workers and build a wall between them and management. The idea is to draw on the expertise of the workers most familiar with the work. Also, if real change is to be realized, management must be willing to follow through with the necessary changes. That’s not the time to tighten the purse strings.

Whether MBWA or the Gemba Walk there is one prerequisite for success−both work best in an organizational culture that is open and where people generally trust each other, i.e., the organization is not dysfunctional.

Just like finding out if there’s water sloshing around the engine room, Gemba Walks help management best assess how well the organization is tuned to seeing issues, analyzing them, finding their causes, and solving them. This is an important point to make: the Gemba Walk is an opportunity to see teamwork, or lack thereof, in action. These may be more valuable insights than finding a problem with a product design or machine. You find out quickly whether all the harping and pontificating, and strategically placed posters about the necessity of teamwork, trust, and empowerment actually made a difference in your organization.

Dwight Eisenhower once quipped, “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and your 1,000 miles away from a cornfield.” Eisenhower was talking about bureaucrats that manage from their offices without ever going out amongst their constituents to learn firsthand who they are and what they’re facing on a daily basis. This is not unlike many management teams that pontificate from their offices without ever really knowing who works in the organization aside from their direct reports. What Eisenhower is doing here is making the case for “Management by Walking Around.”

Management by Walking Around (MBWA) refers to a style of business management (actually more of a leadership tool than a management tool) which involves managers wandering around the workplace, in an unstructured manner, to talk directly, one-on-one with employees. Many believe MBWA is about the boss digging into the status of ongoing work, the problems faced, or to glean from the employees any suggestions they may have for improvement. That’s important but it’s not the main purpose of MBWA. It’s more important for the boss to simply just get to know the employees by name and know who they are and what they face in their personal lives, i.e., an opportunity to practice empathy–a time for the boss to come down from the ivory tower.

MBWA is a concept started in the 1970’s and popularized by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in the 1980’s. A 2008 article in “The Economist” described MBWA this way: “Managers consistently reserving time to walk through their departments and/or to be available for impromptu discussions.” The online Business Dictionary defines MBWA as: “Unstructured approach to hands-on, direct participation by the managers in the work-related affairs of their subordinates, in contrast to rigid and distant management. In MBWA practice, managers spend a significant amount of their time making informal visits to work area and listening to the employees. The purpose of this exercise is to collect qualitative information, listen to suggestions and complaints, and keep a finger on the pulse of the organization.”

The expected benefit is that a manager, by randomly talking to the employees, is more likely to facilitate improvements to the morale, sense of organizational purpose, productivity and teamwork in the organization, as compared to remaining in their office waiting for information to funnel up the chain of command. Another key advantage is that (if approached properly) the “walk” can enhance the leaders’ authenticity as the employees will see him/her as more approachable. Needless to say, MBWA goes hand-in-hand with an open-door management policy. Despite efforts to go around and talk to the employees on their turf, good leaders should still encourage their employees to come see them on their turf−this removes the ivory tower syndrome.

MBWA is an entirely different approach than normal where management sits in their offices waiting for employees to come to them, or for status reports to be delivered up through the chain of command or be presented in some weekly “status meeting.” MBWA does not mean just spending time with just those who report directly to the boss. For it to work at all, all levels of management need to visit with the front-line workers as well as meeting amongst themselves. Also this effort needs to become a regular process. Lack of consistency is likely to be seen as lack of commitment on management’s part.

Also another key element is that effective MBWA is simply not possible when it’s forced or hurried. The primary goal is to foster relationships, and that’s something that just can’t be done if it is obvious that the boss is rushing to his next appointment. The employees will pick up on any lack of sincerity, and that will make receiving any benefits of the walk much more difficult.

Thought not the main purpose, a peripheral benefit of management by walking around is that the boss can gain valuable information through these impromptu discussions with individual workers or small groups. He/she can get first-hand information on the latest issues or problems without the normal filtering that happens when problems are percolated up the management ladder. That said it must be remembered that the objective for the boss is NOT to solve these problems during these walk-arounds. In other words if the problem is within the range of responsibility of the employee then let him/her solve it. If MBWA is to remain an effective tool, the boss still needs to let the management structure, in-between himself and the source of the information, solve the problem on their own. If the boss steps in to solve the problem then he’s bordering on interference or, at the very least, micro-managing. Either alienates the workforce, destroys trust, nullifies empowerment and makes the next boss’s visit a dreaded event.

Another caution is that if the boss does learn of some impending problem from say one of the factory workers, he/she cannot run off to that employee’s manager (or some other middle manager) and confront them with it, want to know why they don’t know about the problem or demand immediate action. This behavior has a name: it’s called playing “stump the dummy.” Top management playing stump the dummy is a hallmark of a dysfunctional organization.

MBWA, properly implemented, sends a positive message to those responsible for the organization’s success−the individual team members. It demonstrates the boss’s interest in the individuals and in the work they do. And, it also permits the boss to stay in touch with the pulse of the organization while conveying a positive example of leadership.

Some would say that MBWA is obsoleted by the information age. Today information speeds along the electronic highway in an incomprehensible blur so why bother talking the time to walk around when you can send an e-mail to many people instantaneously? Eisenhower’s above quote would describe that perfectly. The problem with this is that it is counterproductive and actually increases the distance between management and the employees.

The biggest problem with management by walking is that it’s often used for exactly the opposite reason then it’s intended. Bad bosses see MBWA as a means of “cracking the whip.” Used in a command and control way it becomes oppressive. If the boss is simply critical or domineering then this will alienate the employees. MBWA provides the perfect opportunity for the boss to offer instant praise for work well done. In other words MBWA is not about finding people “doing things wrong,” but “doing things right.”

In his 2012 book: Go – Starting a Personal Growth Revolution, Steven Blandino tells us of a disease that infects many management teams. He calls it “mindless mingling” and describes it as such: “Over time I’ve come realize that leaders can easily succumb to a disease called, ‘Mindless Mingling.’ Mindless mingling occurs when the thinking life of a leader experiences a deficit because of limited knowledge or a limited relational network. In other words, how I think is limited by what I know, who I know, or who I listen to. I become “mind-less” because I “mingle” with the same people and draw from the same pool of knowledge.” This reminds us of the bureaucrats that Eisenhower was talking about. If upper management only mingles with upper management then the result is a sort of incestuous closed thinking that becomes mired down in the status quo. MBWA should not just be management mindlessly mingling with other management. MBWA is an opportunity for management to step out of their sphere of knowledge and expand their perspective of their own organization.

Even business management sage W. Edwards Deming once opined on the topic of MBWA by saying, “‘Management by walking around’ is hardly ever effective. The reason is that someone in management, walking around, has little idea about what questions to ask, and usually does not pause long enough at any spot to get the right answer.”

What Deming is pointing out is that many managers don’t use MBWA appropriately. If you’re a boss and want to use the MBWA technique, or are already using it, take the time to assess how you’re approaching the process and make sure you’re taking the right approach for the right reason.

I’m hesitant at this point to call it a fad, but “Mindfulness” has risen lately to become the topic of many an article on the business web-sites. It’s being flaunted as a way to reduce stress and generally produce a healthier, happier work force. Why is fighting stress important? Well it appears to be one of the major maladies of the working class these days. According to the World Health Organization, the cost of employee stress to American businesses is as high as $300 billion. Mindfulness is being billed as the way for individuals to counter the ill effects of stress, make themselves happier in their jobs, and increase productivity, i.e., it sounds like a win-win for both the individual and their organization.

Mindfulness was popularized in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. As the founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, he created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program primarily to treat the chronically ill. Though it has its roots in Buddhist meditation, the practice of mindfulness has entered the American mainstream like gangbusters in recent years.

Mindfulness has become quite popular and to its credit many top companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo, Starbucks, Toyota and many more have adopted it and set in place programs for their employees to practice it.

In a nutshell, Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment. The following description explains the basic philosophy: “When you are mindful you become keenly aware of yourself and your surroundings, and you simply observe these things as they are. You are aware of your own thoughts and feelings, but you do not react to them in the way that you would if you were on “autopilot.” By not labeling or judging the events and circumstances taking place around you, you are freed from your normal tendency to react to them.”

Being “mindful” means that you concentrate (meditate) on something like your breath, your body, an image, a word, or a feeling, thus mindfulness itself can be understood as the “synchronization” of body and mind. Your body and mind are together in time, space, and experience–you are simply present. Thus, mindfulness means being fully present with whatever it is you’re doing or experiencing in the moment. When your attention drifts off somewhere else or is interrupted (maybe to the sound of an annoying colleague), mindfulness requires that you make note of that distraction and then return your focus to the object of your meditation. Mindfulness techniques are supposedly very effective in calming the mind and producing feelings of relaxation and positive emotion.

Mindfulness is the opposite of being “mindless” or on “automatic pilot.” It’s also the opposite of multitasking because it means being focused on just one thing in the moment. There’s a certain irony here, in that many organizations will preach mindfulness yet expect their employees to multitask to be more efficient. They are in fact mutually exclusive.

So what we have is that “meditation” has been reinvented, so to speak, as mindfulness and now we have “mindfulness” emerging as a new workplace buzzword.

Mindfulness isn’t for everybody, or every situation, as it’s obviously easier to cultivate in certain occupations or organizational contexts, i.e., mindfulness is diametrically opposed to organizational cultures that value working fast, multitasking, and being hyper-busy. It appears great for office workers, but you can’t shut down an assembly line so everyone can take a “mindful” day-dreaming break.

The problem I personally have with the concept is it has an implication that all problems are personal mental problems and if we just step back and be mindful they will all be solved. But of course, we all know that’s not really true because sooner or later we need to wake-up and address the real practical problems we face every day. This is especially true if we find ourselves in a dysfunctional organization.

Another pitfall is that mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them and without admitting that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to think or feel in a given moment, i.e., that we just accept that our situation just plain sucks. When we practice mindfulness we ignore what’s happened (all the abuse) in the past and don’t give a thought to the future (that as soon as the mindfulness break ends the abuse will begin again).

Mindfulness has received a lot of positive press lately, as a way to accept our situation–even if it’s miserable–and be happier. However, there are times and places where being dumb as a brick is the smartest thing you can do. Having done some manual labor myself in my career, I’m skeptical that focused awareness on a dull, hot, and painful job would cause the inherent stress to subside and make the job any more palatable. If you want to truly change your situation, just accepting it isn’t the answer–getting off you duff and finding a new job is the real answer.

There’s also a tendency to view mindfulness as a panacea of all our problems. Although the scientific evidence for mindfulness is compelling, most of the articles I found concentrate on its use outside the work environment, with little attention to the contextual features of “work.” Many studies have used student samples or patient populations seeking treatment for medical or psychological symptoms. Thus, I find the efficacy of mindfulness for employees in a dysfunctional organization still uncertain.

From my own understanding of the concepts and benefits of mindfulness it would certainly appear it’s not really suited for an organization struggling to stay alive. In other words even Jon Kabat-Zinn admits that for mindfulness to work effectively it needs to be a successful business.

Of course you’ll temporarily feel better if you don’t have to face your unwanted thoughts and emotions about your dreadful stressful job. However those feelings are there for a reason−to alert you of problems in your environment and/or your thinking. These are problems that you may or may not be able to fix. Of course you’ll have fewer worries if you stop thinking about your problems, but you’ll have to then perform the mindfulness ritual more often to keep that “high.” This turns the mindfulness sessions into little better than exercises of day-dreaming or, more accurately, navel gazing.

This is because if you’re in a dysfunctional organization the problems are really beyond your control. You can’t mediate your way out of a dysfunctional work culture. In these organizations you’ll face constant interpersonal conflict, communication issues, back-stabbing colleagues, and workaholic and micromanaging bullying bosses, just to name a few.

Since mindfulness is a Buddhist construct, I read an interview with a Buddhist Zen priest who was very critical of the use of mindfulness in the corporate setting–which he referred to as “structures of suffering.” He preached an alternative called, “Right Mindfulness.”

As he explained: “Buddha taught that a person’s actual position in the world and their value is based on their actions, and that people have to take responsibility as individuals for their actions. Fast-forward to what we have today in the West, a terribly individualist ideology. The greatest threat to any of these progressive movements, like mindfulness, is that they can be turned into a commodity that is sold back to us. We are constantly being sold this commodity of individualism.

“Buddha on the other hand would have recognized that we have created systems and structures of suffering and that the suffering is not just about individuals experiencing racism, sexism, and various kinds of oppression; what we have are structures of suffering (corporations) that also have to be addressed.

“The problem and risk is that mindfulness is being seen as a technology, presented as a technique, which is sold to us almost as our panacea. Certainly a lot of it is very good. Mindfulness is now happening in schools and prisons, in settings where it is truly useful. But I worry about it being brought into a corporate context. In those contexts people are being helped to find ease and to thus suffer less within systems that are causing the suffering. Right Mindfulness would be looking at the actual function of that system as well as the freedom that an individual within that system feels. A Right Mindfulness perspective looks at the function of that system. That’s the larger, often neglected view of mindfulness.”

His point is a good one: today mindfulness is being flaunted as a technique for people trapped in organizations (structures of suffering) to escape the suffering. The real issue for people in these type organizations is that they need not to just escape the suffering but engage it, understand the causes, and then “fix” the system so as to remove the suffering. Mindfulness is just a way to escape something that really should be faced head-on.

Last week’s post brings up a critical issue facing most workplaces: work-life balance. Management teams will preach that they support a culture of work-life balance yet, as we learned last week, behaviors that border on workaholism are praised and encouraged. However, for management teams serious about providing their workers true work-life balance there is one proven way to have it both ways. That way involves the commitment to shift to measuring employees by their “results” not just (or only) their attendance and to allow them the privilege of working “flex-hours.”

Enter what’s called the Result’s Only Work Environment, or ROWE. The “Results Only Work Environment” is a human resource management strategy co-created by Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler wherein employees are paid for results (output) rather than the number of hours worked. While Thompson and Ressler may have trademarked the acronym, that doesn’t preclude any organization from implementing the key strategy of a results-only approach to management.

Results-only is a management strategy where employees are evaluated on their performance, not presence; where workers can work whenever, and however they choose to, as long as they achieve their results. Notice I didn’t say “where” in that statement. I’m not a big fan of allowing employees to “work-from-home.” Face it most jobs really can’t be done completely from home. Also there should be constraints on the “when,” such that there are not people coming in at all hours of the night.

Sounds like it could be chaotic and quite frankly it can be. That’s why many organizations are averse to flex work schedules−it can quickly get out of control. Yahoo was the latest big corporation to put a stop to the work from home aspect of their flex work schedule.

That said many flex work schemes implode simply because of a lack of true management support. Since an organization’s management teams exerts the strongest influence on culture, nothing undermines a supportive flex work-life culture more quickly than management who flaunts work-life balance on one hand, yet believes that flexible work and work-life initiatives are nothing but frills that serve to coddle employees. Another way that flexible work schedules can fail is because they necessarily require being coupled with a results-only philosophy−to continue to measure employee performance by old standards of performance leads to distrust and ambiguity. In other words deep down management stills harbors the distrust that when an employee is “out of sight” he/she is probably not working.

So how is each employee’s “results measurement” determined? This is the hardest part of implementing the results-only philosophy. First the boss and the employee must ask the question: “Who in the organization actually counts on the employee for his/her results?” Certainly the boss counts on the employee, but don’t the employee’s coworkers count on him/her too? And how about any subordinates of the employee? What about the firms’ customers? And don’t forget there’s people in others parts of the organization that rely of the employee’s results? Isn’t the employee accountable for results to all of them, maybe in different ways? It’s not just the boss that the employee owes results!

The question then is to determine for each of these dependencies “for what” is the employee accountable for? Each of these results areas needs to be explored and quantified or the results-only measurement system will fail.

When there’s incomplete definition for the results expectations, it leads to important needs being dropped and frustration from all parties. There needs to be a clear mechanism to sort out any misalignment of expectations between parties. So when expectation and results don’t match, the blame-game begins and quickly spirals out of control–playing politics becomes an effective path to working around the system and this pulls everyone in the organization into the interpersonal drama and the “games people play.”

On the other hand, when an organization has an effective process and supporting culture to clarify “what” the employees will count on each other for, they can channel any frustration of misaligned expectations into an opportunity for organizational learning and evolution and change.

Last, but not least, another factor that must be addressed is that results obtained without any consideration for how they are obtained, i.e., ethically v. non-ethically is destructive to any organization. In other words the end does not justify the means. To gain individual results people can’t leave a trail of dead bodies.

Despite the potential downside, a result-only method of evaluating employees is supported by decades of research studies that have shown that it can be a key−but not the only one−to motivating and engaging a workforce for maximum performance, commitment, and satisfaction.

Results-only works when management and the employees understand and agree on what needs to be done, and then the employee is given the autonomy, trust and support to accomplish those objectives in the ways that work best for them. Also, for it to work effectively, management must provide “timely” feedback and recognition to let the employee know how well they’re doing against the objectives. This is probably the single area that, when not done properly, could derail the best laid management intentions when setting up the results-only environment. That’s because most organizations are still mired down in the once a year drive-by that is the performance review process that is a remnant of the command and control mentality still prevalent in much of the business world.

Doug Kirkpatrick, one of the pioneers of Self-Management, explains why giving up the command and control mentality in favor of results-only mentality is important: “The command-and-control management model, a relic of the Industrial Revolution, no longer harmonizes well with a world where information moves at the speed of light. Self-Management starts and ends with the premise that in order to achieve greater productivity and engagement, people should not employ force against others and should keep their commitments. Self-Management principles simply respect the way we already live our lives outside of work. In our personal lives, we make all kinds of crucial, life-changing decisions without a boss−where to go to college, who to marry, what to do for a living. If employees know what to do and how to do it, why do they need managers?”

The command and control management mentality is based on the belief that stress makes an employee perform better while, on the other hand, boosting his satisfaction makes him lazy. This underlying belief persists because command and control is still alive in many modern businesses. Why? Despite enormous research evidence to the contrary command and control is simpler for managers to comprehend and much less challenging than becoming a true servant leader.

Can a results-only work environment universally work, that’s the question? Certainly not, if a key feature to its success is allowing employees a flexible work schedule. Recall from last week’s post, the 2010 study published in Human Relations, in which a group of researchers, led by University of California Davis business professor Kimberly Elsbach, conducted extensive interviews of 39 corporate managers. According to that study the lack of face time was a central problem for employees, who are routinely perceived more negatively than workers the boss sees regularly. In the long run, these negative perceptions hurt the performance reviews of the flex workers. The take away is that despite management appearing to support flex work, results-only work environments, the deep down attitudes of managers may not have changed at all.

Research has shown that a work culture where employees are truly held accountable for “results not attendance” is a powerful predictor of employee work-life balance as well as a key element in job performance, organizational commitment, and employee retention rates. Unfortunately for organizations teetering on the edge of extinction, the last thing the management team will consider is allowing the employees more freedoms. What usually happens is that in bad times that’s when the screws get turned on the employees, thus further demotivating them and thus sealing the fate of the organization.

In a 2010 study published in Human Relations, a group of researchers led by University of California Davis business professor Kimberly Elsbach conducted extensive interviews of 39 corporate managers. They found that managers generally considered their employees who spent more time in the office [face time] to be more dedicated, more hardworking, and more responsible. On the surface this doesn’t sound so bad however, according to the study, “it appears that managers in corporate settings use face time to judge employees’ work contributions, creating a disadvantage for employees who are seen less often or are not seen as putting in adequate overtime.” The take away is that if working long hours is the norm in your office and you work normal hours, i.e., you pride yourself on getting your work done in eight hours, then you’re setting yourself up for this to quite possibly be held against you at review time.

In my career, I’ve seen a lot of people do this–work extended hours for little better a reason than to try to impress the boss. So how prevalent is the practice of working long hours so as to impress the boss.

In the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force study in the December, 2006, issue of Harvard Business Review, authors Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Carolyn Buck Luce outlined their conclusions about American’s obsession with work. They state that; “professionals are working harder than ever and that the 40-hour workweek is a thing of the past. In fact, the 60-hour workweek is commonplace.” Hewlett and Luce say; “62% of high-earning individuals they studied worked more than 50 hours a week and 35% worked more than 60 hours. Most respondents indicated they worked on average 16 hours a week more than they did five years ago. This is because bosses tend to think that ‘presence equals productivity,’ so workers often feel forced to provide proof of their commitment by working more hours.”

Thus “face time” at work is commonly used by bosses to assess their employees on traits such as “initiative,” “dedication,” “leadership,” and “teamwork.” In fact, psychologists have shown that working extra hours has effects on other types of employee evaluations, even if the actual work behaviors of the employees do not support these evaluations. Yes bosses will actually ignore the fact that an employee is a marginal contributor yet praise them because they are there from the crack of dawn to late into the evening.

There’s also another side to this. It seems that the boss’s assessment of an employee is also coded positively or negatively depending on how the boss interprets the “motives” for the employee working the extra hours. An employee’s extra “dedication” might be viewed with suspicion when other employees are not putting in the extra hours. The take away is that you don’t want to be the only one working long hours. This is especially true if your boss isn’t the type to work extra hours just for the sake of working extra hours, i.e., he/she isn’t a workaholic. He/she will undoubtedly see you as a threat. And aside from your boss’s negative perception of your work hours, your colleagues will undoubtedly label you a suck-up sycophant. The other thing to keep in mind is that if you find yourself having to work extra hours just to get your job done then “you have a personal problem.”

Myself, I liked coming into work early when I was fresh and there were fewer distractions and interruptions. This would be a favored behavior of all the poor slobs who have to work in one of those “open offices” I talked about a couple of weeks ago. It may be the only time they can accomplish their work without interruption.

The bottom line is that you need to be judicious before setting off and establishing a trend of coming in early and/or leaving late.

The problem with just coming in early is that if you really only work eight hours you’ll find yourself being the first one to leave in the afternoon. This, of course, will raise the eyebrows of all including the boss−how easy it is for them to forget that you came in early. Actually the boss may come in late and thus not know you got in early therefore you don’t get credit for the sacrifice.

No matter what you do you’ll find yourself between the proverbial rock and a hard place. If you stay late you’ll find yourself stuck staying late because if you decide to leave early you’ll be center stage in the spotlight. Once you begin expanding your work hours on a regular basis, working “normal” hours starts to look like slacking off. In other words, if you establish a pattern of coming in early and staying late, your extended hours become your new normal.

Over 150 years of research proves that when employees work sustained long hours it kills profits, productivity, and the employees themselves, yet as the Brain Drain Task Force study above shows workers still keep putting in long hours and bosses still expect that behavior. The 40-hour work-week was a business decision, based on empirical data of increased efficiency and employee morale, and has been embedded in America’s history for the last 100 years, yet it’s funny how quickly we, as a society, have forgotten this.

For every extra hour worked, there is a direct cost to the employee. By working more hours in a day, employees are forced to make trade-offs without considering the long-term effects on both themselves, and the organization. Does your organization struggle to make its goals despite everyone working virtually 24/7? This means that all those hours spent by everyone are meaningless unless they are focused on the betterment of the organization, i.e., unless they equate to better results. In other words working long hours just for the sake of working long hours is useless. This is especially true in an organization that’s bankrupt in the areas of empowerment, trust, respect, or that really cares about work-life balance. In fact show me an organization where everyone is putting in long hours and I’ll show you an organization that’s rooted in the blame game.

The problem with the whole come in early, leave late behavior is that many managers will praise their employees not for the value, or results, that the employee added to the organization, but merely for their physical presence. For bosses it’s easy to count hours but much harder to “lead,” i.e., draw from each employee the best results while being supportive of a healthy work-life balance. The irony is that bosses will use the come in early−leave late dictate when times get tough without realizing that it does more damage than good.

Having to work extra hours just to impress the boss, or match everyone else’s work hours, is just more evidence that dysfunction has overtaken your organization. And if you find yourself in an organization where long hours are the norm, yet it struggles to keep its head above water, then you’re in the wrong organization. My advice to you is the same as T. Boone Pickens:’ “Work eight hours and sleep eight hours, and make sure that they are not the same eight hours.”

Thirty-two percent of U.S. workers are seriously considering changing jobs, according to a Gallup poll of nearly 30,000 workers in 17 countries, including 2,400 in the U.S. That’s up from 23 percent in 2005. Another 21 percent view their company unfavorably and scored near the bottom when it comes to loyalty, commitment and motivation. And ignoring a boss’s request, 25 percent took that route. The real telling statistic was that those willing to punish the boss–either actively or passively–were 59 percent. That’s an interesting statistic: ~60% of workers are so unhappy with their boss that they’re considering retaliation.

In their 2002 book, The Law of the Hog – How the World’s Best Leaders Solve Tough People Problems, authors Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Al Switzler and Ron McMillan, tell an interesting story about employee retaliation against a bad boss. “A lumber processing plant brought in some management consultants from Stanford University to measure the impact of an ongoing leadership-training program. While interviewing a group of hourly employees of the plant, one consultant asked, “What happens when you don’t get along with your supervisor?” As one they immediately blurted: ‘The hog!’

“The consultants had been introduced to ‘the hog’ earlier that day. In the corner of the mill sat a shack where scraps were ground into sawdust by a monstrous set of saw blades. This was the hog. Employees mentioned ‘the hog’ as their cure to poor supervision. ‘We don’t throw the boss into the hog,’ someone went on to explain. ‘We throw good plywood into the hog. That way we kill his productivity numbers and get him in trouble.’ Revenge, sabotage, payback—were the name of the game. If a boss did something employees didn’t like, they got even by ‘feeding the hog.’ This then is ‘The Law of the Hog.’ Meaning: When employees dislike how they’ve been treated, expect a drop in productivity.”

Admittedly the story is bit extreme–not everybody seeks such dramatic revenge. In fact, most people don’t–that’s a good thing. The most common form of feeding the hog takes place when people spend their time thinking about how they were treated rather than finding ways to be more effective, efficient, proactive, or whatever the latest management wishful thinking might dictate of them.

From the same Gallup poll noted above, we find that: “In fact, 40 percent of the people interviewed said they had more energy and creativity to give to the company than they were currently giving. More surprising still, 44% of the employees questioned agreed that they put in as little effort as they could without being fired.”

In her 2010 article, “The Law of the Hog–Are You Standing in the Way?,” Gail Pischak supports these statistics, “In fact the most common form of ‘feeding the hog’ is when employees react passively to bad treatment–they just don’t give their all or maybe they withhold information that could be essential to a decision. This is what is referred to as ‘Discretionary Effort.’ This means that employees make personal choices about how to spend their time at work–whether to be productive or not. By its definition, you can’t pay for Discretionary Effort; you can’t beat, cajole, or entice it out of anyone. It’s what employees do willingly, because they want to. Thus ‘The Law of the Hog’ is when good employees get fed up with how they’re being treated.”

Hogs are costly. That’s because as employees become disgruntled, they will use their discretionary time in non-productive ways. When employees feel mistreated by management the biggest time waster is that they spend hours fretting over how they’ve been treated—instead of doing their job or thinking about quality improvements, or better ways to serve customers, or new methods to increase productivity. It’s this absence of initiative, creativity and collaboration that really kills an organization. And recalling last weeks’ post: changing the way the desks are situated gives new meaning the old allegory of “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

In their 2010 Strategy and Business article “Getting Back at the Boss–Passive Retaliation against Bad Management Finds its Fans in the Workplace,” authors Gary Charness (University of California at Santa Barbara) and David I. Levine (University of California at Berkeley) tell us: “Getting revenge against a supervisor is more acceptable to employees when the retaliation is an act of omission or inaction–essentially not doing something–than when it is an active attempt to cause harm. This is called “passive withdrawal of effort.” Examples of this would be something like: hiding a file or refraining from telling the boss its location. Also, denying knowledge about something when the boss is witch hunting would qualify despite actually being advantageous to all in the organization.

Most employee retaliation is done quietly “under the table.” This bears out from my own experience as I’ve noticed that really dysfunctional workplaces are not this intense atmosphere that you might think−people are just quietly doing the bare minimum of their jobs. Thus most highly dysfunctional organizations are relatively calm to an outside observer. That’s because, in workplace cultures that are rife with dysfunctional boss behavior, the general atmosphere is more of a general malaise that mutes all the drama. Of course the turmoil is there it’s just under the surface festering within each of the organization’s inhabitants. Plus if you’re going to sabotage the boss you don’t want to make it obvious–do you?

So a question naturally arises here:  What constitutes bad supervision, i.e., the kind that makes employees resort to retribution?” In most workplaces, it is the way the supervisors communicate with employees that’s usually the problem. A recent online survey indicated that 69% of respondents felt that it is difficult or impossible to confront and successfully resolve conflict with their boss.  More than half admitted to avoiding a crucial conversation with the boss and a full 93% of these say that it has affected the quality of their work. Thus as Patterson, Grenny, Switzler and McMillan would tell any manager: “Anytime you hold a crucial confrontation poorly a hog gets fed.”

It would seem that if supervisors and managers could handle confrontational topics with their employees in a direct and respectful manner it would go a long way to fostering a work environment where people feel trusted and can engage in activities that benefit both themselves and the business at hand. In other words they wouldn’t be forced into pondering retaliation. Sadly though, in a business world that preaches only “results by any means,” handling conflict is not seen as one of the core roles of management−in fact in most organizations conflict is usually originated by management.

In the late 1930s, Harvard psychologist Burrhus Frederick (B.F.) Skinner [1904-1990], a member of U.S. Army Intelligence, fine-tuned the art of human control into what he termed “operant conditioning.”

Skinner’s most famous invention, aimed at producing a “socialized child,” was the environmentally controlled “baby tender,” a crib-sized container into which he put scores of children including his own. Skinner built this “conditioning chamber” for his daughter as an improvement over the conventional crib. His goal was to provide a clean, quiet, safe, and comfortable place. He had the air filtered and heated and maintained a constant temperature. The infant had room to move freely and there was no danger of smothering or coking. While the device was not successful commercially, I believe it could clearly serve as a prototype of today’s modern office space cubicle and the environment he set out to replicate sounds a lot like the workplace.

The office partitions that we all lovingly refer to as cubicles were first introduced in the late 1960s by the office furniture company Herman Miller Inc. The idea behind the concept was to create a more efficient open-office model that Herman Miller called the “Action Office.” In reality cubicles became popular because they were a relatively cheap way to give workers an office without relying on heavy construction.

And now we have the “open office” layout fad. Many think the open office concept was developed as a response to the unhappiness of everyone with the “dilbertian” cubical environment however the “open office” concept actually got its start long before the cubicle. The cubicle was actually an attempt to make the open office “bullpens,” prominent in the 1940’s, into an environment that provided marginally more personal space for the employee. It gave the employee less of a feeling of being expendable. 

So in reality all we’re seeing is the pendulum swinging back to the open space office layouts. The death of the cubicle has begun in large part because of every management team wanting to emulate the success of companies like Google and Facebook. Thus it’s now spreading around the business world like wildfire. The underlying impetus for this fad–that’s been brainwashed into corporate management these days–is that the key to success is all about nurturing more collaboration and innovation and the way to that end is the open space office.

Seems that because Google and Facebook are successful, many corporations have been convinced that by emulating what they do, they too will be wildly successful. Of course in most cases this is without changing any other thing they’re doing.

So how exactly does the open office accomplish collaboration and innovation? Supposedly the open space floor plans, with broad open spaces where people sit side-by-side at tables with no partitions between them, will somehow make them want to talk business with each other and by interacting they will collaborate and innovate. Brings new meaning to ‘thinking outside the box,’ or in this case “outside the cubicle.” Actually Skinner had the right description for it: “operant conditioning.”

Additionally the open, zoo-like, space is supposed to increase the number of interruptions each worker will have which will then build collaboration and sharing, which in turn increases innovation. This I find is somewhat of a perverted logic.

Studies show that the average employee suffers 56 interruptions a day.Based on this statistic alone the open office environment should be the most productive environment in the history of business. However studies also show that the average employee spends upwards of 2 hours per day just recovering from distractions and trying to refocus on the task at hand. What’s telling is that 80% of those interruptions are considered trivial. This all equates to the fact that only 60% of work time is actually spent productively.

Somewhere in there innovation (and motivation) is supposed to be increased. These open spaces are also supposed to increase a sense of community amongst all the inmates. The idea being that the other ingredients to a successful organization like, trust, empowerment, respect, empathy, etc. don’t much matter to success. So what’s the verdict? Is this new fad the panacea that companies have been looking for to miraculously get everyone to “get along” and be “team players?”

In her 2013 Forbes article, “New Research: Workers Hate Their Cubicles,” Susan Adams gives us some insight. She tells us, “Cubicle-dwellers will not be surprised by new research from the University of Sydney, Australia: [R]oughly half of those who sit in open-plan offices with no partitions, say they find a “lack of sound privacy” to be a source of frustration. The bottom line of the new study: It looked at worker frustration in 15 categories from noise level to space to light and air quality. Workers in their own offices came out ahead in every category.”

Further Adams tells us: “Open plan office layouts have been touted as a way to boost workplace satisfaction and team effectiveness in recent years. We found people in open plan offices were less satisfied with their workplace environment than those in private offices.” So how exactly does “less satisfaction” equate to increased collaboration and more innovation? This type work environment seems quite de-motivating in my mind.

Adams also tells us, “…it turns out that the theory [of open-space layouts] was not based on empirical evidence. More than two years ago, the Harvard Business Review ran a piece that described a study of employees at Scandinavian Airlines. The company had redesigned its headquarters back in 1987 to include a central thoroughfare that linked various amenities like a café, shopping, exercise areas and a medical center. There were also several “multi-rooms” with comfy furniture, coffeemakers, photocopiers and office supplies. Management encouraged employees to hold “impromptu meetings” and “creative encounters.” Instead only 9% of employee exchanges happened along the thoroughfare and the café and just 27% in all the other public spaces combined. Two thirds of employee exchanges still took place in private offices, most likely because people can hear each other better and protect themselves from being heard by unwanted ears.”

Adams gives us the bottom line: “Open office planners thought that workers would help one another with challenging tasks. But it turns out that while those who need help do better, those who offer help fare worse. It’s not surprising when you think about it. If I know how to do a task, I’m better off getting on to the next thing, rather than losing time trying to teach a less-able coworker.”

In her 2014 New Yorker article, “The Open-Office Trap,” Maria Konnikova provides more proof: “In June, 1997, a large oil and gas company in western Canada asked a group of psychologists at the University of Calgary to monitor workers as they transitioned from a traditional office arrangement to an open one. The psychologists [found that] the employees suffered according to every measure: the new space was disruptive, stressful, and cumbersome, and, instead of feeling closer, coworkers felt distant, dissatisfied, and resentful. Productivity fell.”

So I talked to some of my personal friends that work in these “open space” arrangements and I asked how it’s working out. Their answer: “We have our noise-cancelling headphones on pretty much all the time–because that’s what the environment demands of us. We like talking to each other, but we have been put into an environment that tries to manufacture that talking, and now we do the opposite.” Add to that the fact that the workplace becomes a battleground for games like rubber-band wars and it’s easy to see how without management intervention these environments quickly become counterproductive.

In their 2011 Harvard Business Review article, “Who Moved My Cube?” Anne-Laure Fayard and John Weeks put the whole subject in perspective: “The most effective spaces bring people together and remove barriers while also providing sufficient privacy that people don’t fear being overheard or interrupted. In addition, they reinforce permission to convene and speak freely.”

Isn’t that the function of the organization’s culture–to set the right environment for collaboration? Seems to me this latest push for the open floor plan is a desperate attempt by management who may have lost control of properly motivating their employees and thus really aren’t “leading.” They then look for a fad solution that will, in effect, save their bacon.

Another management fad floating around the modern workplace is the pressure for all employees to “multi-task.” Right behind “proactive” it’s the second most annoying buzzword in the management lexicon. If we were to assume for a minute that people in fact can concentrate on more than one thing at a time, it appears that the open office puts a torpedo in the “multitasking” illusion also. As Konnikova tells us:“Unfortunately, it seems that the more frantically you [attempt to] multi-task the worse you become at blocking out distractions. And distractions are what the open office is all about. Moreover, according to the Stanford University cognitive neuroscientist Anthony Wagner, heavy multi-taskers are not only ‘more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli’ but also worse at switching between unrelated tasks. In other words, if habitual multi-taskers are interrupted by a colleague, it takes them longer to settle back into what they were doing.” Recall the above fact that the average worker spends upwards of 2 hours per day just recovering from interruptions.

This new fad seems to ignore that the true key to productivity, or collaboration, or innovation, or whatever buzzwords you want, is as simple as fostering coordination (“I’m handing this over to you”), cooperation (“I’m helping you out”) and communication (“I’m keeping you up to date”). For most organizations if those key elements of productivity are missing, changing the floor layout isn’t going to miraculously change anything. It’s the same folly that we see with organizational charts–when in trouble the first thing management will do is “re-organize.”

I’ve said this before: “the key to teamwork, effectiveness and efficiency is as simple as each employee finishing his/her job on time so that the next person can do theirs.”

While I think the days of the individual office for everyone are long gone I do believe that employees would be much more productive if provided some modicum of privacy. A happy medium between the individual office and the open-range is logically the cubicle.

Moving everyone from cubicles to an open space is a case of management taking the buzz-phrase “think outside the box” literally and thus believing that if they take the employee “out of the box” it will miraculously make them think, perform and innovate differently. As I’ve said before in past posts, management should first inspire their employees to “think inside the box,” i.e., the cubicle.

It seems that the verdict is in: the open space office is counterproductive−certainly to the stated goals. I’m sure if you ask anyone working in an open-office environment they’d say they would prefer their old cubicle any day. With that said: let the “fight for the last cubicle” begin.

The Screwtape Letters is a satirical novel written by C. S. Lewis, and first published in 1942. The story takes the form of a series of letters from an elderly retired Demon in Hell named Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, a young devil who has just started work in the real world. The uncle is mentoring his nephew on his new responsibility for securing the damnation of a British man known only as “the Patient.”

The lead character Screwtape holds an administrative post in the bureaucracy (“Lowerarchy”) of Hell. The Screwtape Letters consists of thirty-one letters from Screwtape to Wormwood. In the body of the letters, Screwtape gives Wormwood detailed advice on various methods of undermining faith and promoting sin in the Patient. Despite the fact the story is written as a comedy, what’s interesting about The Screwtape Letters is that the letters represent very profound observations on human nature.

The “Patient” in the story is a young unmarried man who lives with his mother, gets engaged to a young woman, and has just experienced a conversion to Christianity. Wormwood is given the task of reversing the conversion.Lewis calls the process of Screwtape coaching Wormwood “diabolical ventriloquism.”

While Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood attempt to undo “the Patient” spiritually, the letters also contain some keen psychological insights into human nature. I believe that if we strip away the religious overtones of what’s found in the letters we can see an accurate depiction of the evil (dysfunctional) behaviors we find in the typical workplace.

Lewis, in the story’s foreword, makes this exact point: “The greatest evil is not now done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded and carried) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.  Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”

A related metaphor, which Lewis refers to more than once in the piece, is what he calls “spiritual cannibalism” wherein a stronger entity consumes a weaker one and absorbs its will into its own-sort of spiritual hostile takeover. This “spiritual cannibalism” might prove a good metaphor for what happens every day in the typical workplace as the occupants struggle for position in the hierarchy by throwing each other under the bus.

People jockey for position by tossing others aside by metaphorically absorbing them.  With animals in the wild the absorption takes the form of eating their prey. For the typical office worker, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker person. Thus in the end what one person gains another loses.

Seems Lewis was able to peer into the future and write about the “me” attitudes that permeate our current social mentality−to do whatever’s good for me and all others are damned.

In her article “Sucking Life: The Principle of Hell in Screwtape,” ©2010, Kimberly Moore-Jumonville talks about this: “Screwtape’s training of Wormwood in the art of deception exposes the tempters’ desire to consume “the other” completely into the self. This insatiable appetite to devour is revealed to be the ruling principle of Hell, where one must eat or be eaten.”

In Lewis’s Hell, the demons live by “sucking the will and freedom out of a weaker person into a stronger one.” With the devil being synonymous with evil and, as we learned in last week’s post, the essence of organizational evil is dysfunctional behavior; understanding the Screwtape Letters gives us insight into how the propensity for evil is coached into us all.

While the original letters are written with deep religious overtones I have taken the liberty to edit them with a modern twist. By the way, Wormwood was successful in tempting his “patient” back from Christianity quickly, i.e., between letters one and two. This mirrors how quickly we all can be lulled into the evil behaviors that make the typical workplace a hell.

So here is a one-sentence summary of the Screwtape’s letters as seen from the workplace perspective reflecting the type of advice the devil might make to modern management. In the context of the original letters “him” meant “the Patient,” however for our purposes let in mean “the employee.”

1. Make him preoccupied with the ordinary in life–reduce his expectations for anything better than ordinary–sounds like the prelude to performance review time

2. Encourage him to view his peers from a self-righteous perspective–reinforce that they are inferior–encourage more of the “me’ mentality

3. Annoy him with “daily pinpricks” (this one’s self-explanatory)

4. Keep him from seriously intending to quit, and if that fails, subtly redirect his focus to himself–this is done through the performance review by being so critical of him that he doesn’t believe he’s worthy of a good job

5. Make him suffer, because to support him would be a threat to management’s authority

6. Capitalize on any of his uncertainties about his career and redirect his frustration toward his co-workers–entice him to fight with his peers

7. Keep him ignorant, and make him an extreme pacifist–make him more open to manipulation−explains why training budgets are the first to get cut in rough times

8. Make good use of his emotional troughs and peaks–play on his emotions

9. Capitalize on the trough periods–include his moodiness in the yearly performance review to justify giving him a low raise

10. Convince him to blend in with his colleagues–an underlying reason for the performance review–to make everyone think and act the same

11. When he comes to you with a serious problem use jokes and flippancy to keep from having to actually empathize with him

12. Keep track of his “very small mistakes” because they’ll be needed come review time–the best way to undermine his will is gradually

13. Don’t allow him to experience real workplace pleasure

14. Keep him humble–use both your vanity and false modesty to keep him thinking that management knows best and is completely in charge

15. Make him live in the future rather than the present–at review time tell him “next year can be different if he only changes to meet your expectations”

16. Encourage job-hopping for the ones you don’t want to keep–saves the time needed to justify and document a lay-off

17. Encourage him to think of everything from the “me” perspective–encourage selfishness as it helps keep the employees in competition with each other

18. Convince him that the underlying grounds for his employment is being in love with the job–make him drink the management Kool-Aid

19. Make him believe that the grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence−because it’s not

20. Always be critical of any and all decisions that he makes–make sure he fears taking risks–encourage him to come to you for decisions

21. Convince him to use the pronoun “my” in the fully possessive sense of ownership, e.g., “my time,” “my job,” “my office”–this helps set employee against employee–the essence of divide and conquer

22. Understand that outside of work his world may be full of pleasures and you must make sure he spends the least amount of time there–effectively use micromanagement and workaholism to keep him on the job and critical of his capabilities

23. Encourage him to believe that management knows best and is the only means to the organization’s goals

24. Keep him confused about where he really stands in the ranking–keep him believing he’s toward the bottom of the list and could be a ripe target for layoff

25. Increase his fear−this increases his compliance to do what he’s told

26. Sow seeds of “self-consciousness”–make him believe that he’s not performing to the level of his peers and is the weakest link in the organization

27. Twist his thoughts to your advantage

28. Keep him in line until he grows too old to find another job

29. Defeat his courage, and make him a coward−courage is the building block of empowerment and that’s a threat to management

30. Capitalize on his fatigue−use to management’s advantage in the performance review, i.e., he’s not motivated and thus not a team player

31. His end is not your concern−management shouldn’t have any remorse after a lay-off

As I mentioned earlier the term evil is synonymous with the devil. Consider these 31 points as sort of a primer for evil (or if you prefer: dysfunctional) management developed by the devil. Now you know where dysfunctional, evil, management gets its coaching.

George Bernard Shaw once said; “A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: ‘Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time.’

“When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, ‘The one I feed the most.’”

Thus anyone in management has the choice to listen to the diabolical ventriloquism and follow the devil’s 31 point prompting or to break from the mold and do exactly the opposite−it’s the old low-road v. high-road decision process.

Since the subtitle of my book, Puttin’ Cologne on the Rickshaw is “A Guide to Dysfunctional Management and the Evil Workplace Environments They Create,” I’ve been asked why I used the somewhat harsh term “Evil” to describe the workplace environments created by many dysfunctional management teams. In response I thought I’d delve into why that term is both appropriate and accurate.

Merriam-Webster defines evil as: morally bad; causing harm or injury to someone. and; marked by bad luck or bad events (I suppose if you’re the victim of evil you could say you have bad luck). F. E. Katz, in his book Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil defines it from a human behavior perspective. He tells us evil is: “Behavior that deprives innocent people of their humanity, from small scale assaults on a person’s dignity to outright murder. Evil is about how people behave toward one another, where the behavior of one person, or an aggregate of persons, is destructive to others.” Katz’s second point−how people behave toward one another−of course is the single most important premise of my book and the focus of this post.

This is the type of evil that University of Missouri Professor Guy Adams and Grand Valley State University Professor Danny Balfour call “Administrative Evil.” In their book Unmasking Administrative Evil, ©2004, they tell us what they mean by administrative evil: “We name as evil the actions of human beings that unjustly or needlessly inflict pain and suffering on other human beings.” Adams and Balfour admit that the term “evil” may be too strong for some as they acknowledge: “Others who acknowledge negative interaction in human affairs, prefer the more modern terminology: ‘dysfunctional behavior.’”

As such “Administrative Evil” and “Dysfunctional Behavior” become one and the same.

Adams and Balfour go on to tell us: “Administrative evil has been, and remains, a central feature of both public and private organizations in the modern era. Administrative evil is unlikely to disappear from a society that depends so heavily on organizations and professions that systematically reproduce it. Administrative evil is a social phenomenon and as such is ubiquitous in complex organizations of all kinds.”

They also make another important point: “Administrative evil may be masked in many different ways, but the common characteristic is that people can engage in acts of evil without being aware that they are, in fact, doing anything wrong.” This is important to note as it tends to explain why bullies get away with bullying. Bullying (and all other aberrant behavior) becomes masked in the everyday behaviors of management and thus by default becomes sanctioned. Once sanctioned it becomes very difficult to dislodge.

To explain this sanctioning of Evil, Adams and Balfour use the economic notion of “sunk costs:”  “Each step along the way in which such activity is not halted becomes an additional commitment to that trajectory. This dynamic can be described as ‘successive ratification.’ As a consequence, bringing such activity to a halt requires extraordinarily decisive action.” This “decisive action” is what most dysfunctional management teams are not capable of doing−especially when addressing their own behavior. This explains why changing an evil organizational culture is so hard to do.

So what causes “administrative evil” (or dysfunctional behavior)? Adams and Balfour offer the reason in what they call “Technical Rationality,” a natural consequence and outcome of the way modern organizations function. They tell us: “Technical rationality is a way of thinking and living (a culture) that emphasizes the scientific analytic mindset and the belief in technological progress. [This] diffuses individual responsibility and requires the compartmentalized accomplishment of role expectations in order to perform work on a daily basis.” In other words, our technical-based business culture begets the individualistic “me” attitudes and accompanying behaviors; what they call a “defensive organizational culture.” Also, the “compartmentalized accomplishment of role expectations” is what forms the basis for our heavy reliance on organizational charts as the key to efficient management and pseudo leadership.

Adams and Balfour claim that a “defensive organizational culture can trigger the potential for these destructive dynamics.” We’ve all probably worked in an organization such as this where fear is the order of the day. They also point out that our typical “competitive” and “must win” business attitudes and environments make the perfect breeding ground for administrative evil, and thus dysfunction to be the rule of the day. This then becomes what they call the “organizational identity,” which they describe as: “the totality of repetitive patterns of individual behavior and interpersonal relationships that taken together comprise the unacknowledged meaning of organizational life.”

Browne, Kubasek and Giampetro-Meyer in their 1995 article “The Seductive Danger of Craft Ethics for Business Organizations” expand on this and tell us: “[A] kind of corporate cultural relativism exists in firms today. It is relativism whereby what is right and wrong is determined by what those at the upper reaches of the corporate hierarchy say is right or wrong. And in most corporations, it could be summed up by the phrase, ‘whatever it takes to get the job done.’” And, as agents for upper management, “the [middle] manager’s overriding responsibility is to interpret and follow the corporate culture.” This is what I call “trickle-down evil.”

“Whatever it takes to get the job done” are dangerous words for management to be expounding too often. Sure at times there are pressing tasks or problems that need solutions right away–to be solved at any cost–but those instances are really minimal unless the organization is teetering on the edge of extinction. The problem with this “get ur done” mentality is that management, without ever even saying it (i.e., it’s masked) sets up a cultural environment in which employee mistakes are demonized. Thus, because perfection is really difficult to produce, if at all, this causes employees to start camouflaging their mistakes as a means to survive. This means employees will tell managers what they want to hear−which is further reinforced by the typical “no surprises” management mentality.

Thus when things do go wrong, as they inevitably will, the management thought process is that these organizational failures were not the fault of their own policies, procedures, or, heaven forbid, their behavior, but because someone didn’t follow procedure or the plan−i.e., someone is to blame. If events did not turn out as planned, the problem is never with a faulty management plan, or bad leadership, but with the fact that someone deviated from the plan.

Management’s reaction is never “we need more and better planning, and more efficient, controlled systems that will preclude any mistakes and get things under control.” What’s needed instead is that someone needs to be blamed and punished. This then strengthens the mechanisms of dysfunction−the essence of evil.

In her 2010 article in Forbes Magazine, “The Sociopath In The Office Next Door,” Davia Temin reinforces the notion of evil in the workplace: “Science now is questioning whether there is any difference at all between sociopaths and psychopaths, and that those with narcissistic personality disorder also have some of the same characteristics (an inability to care about anyone but themselves) as psychopaths. [I]t means that ‘evil’ is all around us, even at work.”

Alas, as Aldous Huxley reminds us: “One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.”

When we go to the supermarket we’re inundated with products that claim they’re “new and improved,” or flaunt that they are “natural” or that they’re part of a healthy diet and thus will improve our life and well-being. A product that has questionable health benefits will flaunt that it has twenty different vitamins yet conveniently leave out that if you use it your cholesterol will sky-rocket. We see this type of advertising every day–and we fall for it. That’s because most of us will focus on those “good” benefits, yet we won’t question the convenient absence of any negative product traits. The “positive” features of a product somehow make us feel safe and informed.

The phenomenon in which we will, more often than not, pick products that flaunt positive results and ignore the negative ones is what’s call “The Feature Positive Effect.” Although this phenomenon has existed since advertising first began, the term “The Feature Positive Effect” was first coined by psychology researchers Robert Sainsbury and Herbert Jenkins back in 1967 when they discovered it during experiments with pigeons. There’s some irony to that, in that, when we buy a product based solely on its positive aspects then we are in fact pigeons–a gullible person, someone swindled, or the victim of a confidence trick.

The Feature Positive Effect means that what’s positive about something means more to us than what is missing, or negative. This is why everyone will tend toward believing everything they see on an official looking computer spreadsheet even though we don’t have a clue to the data behind it or, more importantly, what pertinent data may be conveniently missing. As the colloquial saying tells us: “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”  The Feature Positive Effect exists because we all have the tendency to have difficulty processing negative information. It’s even more profound in the case where there’s a complete lack of any negative information. Sainsbury and Jenkins called this a “non-occurrence.” The fact is we have problems perceiving non-events–we are blind to what doesn’t exist or what we’re not told.

Here’s an example of how we ignore non-events, or in this case non-bullet holes.

In World War II, British and United States air forces faced a rising number of their planes being shot down in combat, and the returning planes were badly damaged. A group of scientists were entrusted with the task of analyzing the returned planes to see if there was any pattern to the damage that would provide a clue as to where to place added armor.

The group analyzed the damaged planes and was about to make a recommendation to add armor where there were the most bullet holes, when a young Hungarian mathematician, Abraham Wald (1902–1950), who was part of the group, thought that they were making a grave mistake. Wald analyzed the damaged planes by marking where every bullet hole was on the planes and found that two major sections of the fuselage, one between the wings and the other between the tails, had fewer bullet holes. He recommended putting the armor in those places, i.e., where he saw fewer, not more holes. Why? Since the planes he analyzed hadn’t been shot down, he postulated that it must be the holes he wasn’t seeing (in the planes that weren’t returning) that were causing them to be shot down. Thus, he concluded that the extra protection should be placed in those areas where they found no bullet holes. This was exactly the opposite of what the original group was going to recommend.

Another facet of this phenomenon is the “Implied Endorsement Effect.” We will tend to choose the option that we believe someone else endorses. This explains why restaurants sell more house wines than others. We believe that because the restaurant is recommending a particular wine that it must be good. Although I’ll admit it could equally be because house wines are typically cheaper. If not for the Implied Endorsement Effect many celebrities wouldn’t have a job.

The Implied-Endorsement Effect suggests that decision makers will use the “default” of what’s already being/been done by others to make our decision for us. Thus, we have another closely tied phenomenon called “The Default Effect.”

“The Default Effect” is our tendency for clinging to the status quo. We all tend to make our past our default setting. We will subconsciously look back into our past for a similar experience, and the decision we made then, to dive our decisions in the present. Given the choice of trying something new, or sticking to the tried and true, we tend to be highly conservative, even if the change could be beneficial to us. It’s in play even when no decision options are available. This is called the “No-Action Default” which refers to the fact that we’ll tend toward making no decision when there’s an absence of choice or other pressing motivation to act.

Here we also suffer The Feature Positive Effect because we are more likely to focus on the positive aspects of our default choice option, while conveniently forgetting the negative ones. At the same time, we will remember the negative aspects of the non-default choice. In other words when there are options presented to us, other than our default, we will go out of our way to try to discredit them. We’ll do this before we will even consider the downside of our default option.

Similar to this, and a phenomenon we all also suffer from, is what’s called “The Endowment Effect.” This is the phenomenon in which most individuals tend to value an object more when they own it than when they don’t. This explains why many people are not prone to deferred gratification.

That all said, and as if by magic, once we move into management there’s another phenomenon that takes hold of us. It’s called “The Feature Negative Effect.” It rears its ugly head come performance review time. If during the year an employee displays any bad behavior or has made a mistake−however miniscule–the reviewer will most likely take that more heavily into account than any other innate talent, skill, positive accomplishment or exemplary behavior the employee has shown through the rest of the year.

However the employee (because of The Feature Positive Effect) is much more open to positive praise than to negative nit-picking. Even when the review includes constructive criticism, employees will most likely reject it no matter how useful it may be. This is the main reason the performance review process does little to motivate employees. There’s a large expectation gap.

The bottom line that all these “effects” mean that our decision process is largely driven by our tendency to not want to take the effort associated with deciding what we want. Without a choice that’s highly flaunted, endorsed by some has-been, fits our preexisting preference, or satisfies our drive to own something, identifying the best option and the underlying tradeoffs takes time and increases our cognitive effort. In other words it’s too much work.

In the workplace we see these effects as organizational amnesia–we don’t learn from the past we tend to repeat it. When faced with a problem, or dilemma, we will delve back into our past for solutions versus finding new and innovative ways to solve the problem. Or worse yet we’ll fall for the age old fallacy that “this time will be different.” The problem is that many times our memory paints past experiences as being much rosier than they really were. This is The Positive Feature Effect in action–we make the same mistakes over and over again.